Marc Benioff

By Mark Neuling/CNBC/NBCU/Getty Images.

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Bio

Salesforce C.E.O. Marc Benioff has used his influence as an enterprise software billionaire for good. Specifically, Benioff has been vocal about his contempt for anti-L.G.B.T. bills in several U.S. states, and has used his influence to successfully battle discriminatory legislation. In March, he took issue with Georgia’s religious freedom bill, which would have effectively allowed businesses to legally discriminate based on religious objections to a customer’s lifestyle choices.

Benioff, who is known in Silicon Valley for his philanthropy, suggested that the decision might be economically damaging for Georgia governor Nathan Deal if he signed it into law. Benioff most likely played a part in convincing Deal to veto the bill. He’s also been successful in pressuring Indiana to revise a similar piece of legislation that passed in 2015. Benioff has also contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to hospitals in the Bay Area.

At 15, Benioff got his start in the software industry creating video games. At 19, he was working for Apple luminary Steve Jobs who he now credits for a lot of his success. At 25, he became a millionaire as one of Oracle’s youngest executives. He made a name for himself when he co-founded Salesforce in 1999 in an apartment in San Francisco. Salesforce was “the end of software,” its tagline claimed, and helped change software by using the Internet to, as USA Today once put it, “revamp the way software programs are designed and distributed.” He pioneered the $106-billion software-as-a-service business. Competitors like Oracle and Workday are chasing Benioff’s business, and Microsoft has even tried to buy it.